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A self-hosted server and site manager for WordPress

Serving Up Words

Article from ADMIN 80/2024

By Nigel Bahadur

WPCloudDeploy helps reduce hosting costs for your fleet of WordPress cloud servers by managing dozens or even hundreds of servers and sites with WordPress-specific smarts.

A recent trend in the WordPress realm is WordPress-specific control panels (see the "Overview" box). One of the advantages of these panels is the sheer depth of WordPress idiosyncrasies that are baked in and hidden from your average WordPress users. Another advantage is that the panels connect to server providers such as DigitalOcean, AWS, and others. The panels themselves do not sell server resources; instead, they connect you to your accounts at one or more CloudServer providers and allow you to install your WordPress sites there.

Overview

By most measures, WordPress is the largest content management system (CMS) in use by far, with a more than 40 percent market share [1]. The next closest CMS is Wix with only a 3.6 percent market share. Although you can argue about actual percentages on the basis of who's doing the reporting, almost every report has WordPress market share at more than 10 times the next closest competitor.

One of the consequences of this lopsided lead has been the rise of WordPress-specific services, starting with dedicated WordPress hosts such as WP Engine. Next, general hosting companies created WordPress-specific offerings with dedicated WordPress tools for management, backups, migration, and more.

Although Plesk and cPanel hosting control panels are imbued with WordPress-specific functions, they are still general-purpose tools that aim to be all things to all people. Two of the first WordPress-specific control panels were GridPane and SpinupWP. If you wanted to host sites other than WordPress on these services, you could not do so. For them, it was WordPress all the time.

Users of these panels can choose server sizes and server load (how many sites, what types, etc. go on each server). With this approach the cost of running a WordPress

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